The Storm at the Door (15 page)

The church, the plain white space of it, Puritan sparse. The minister, Hank James, coordinated to the building’s austere theme with his white and balding head, and also with his sermon, in which he tells of desert wanderings in his arid language. Before the minister, in fours and fives and sixes, mothers and fathers with their progeny, all in their plain suits and dresses. Near the front of the church, two rows from the pulpit, the family that will one day be my own: my grandmother Katharine; my aunts, Rebecca, Louise, Jillian; and my mother, Susie. My grandfather is absent.

When Katharine lifts her head for a split second during another recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, she catches, from across the aisle, what she takes to be a scrutinizing glance from Donna Littleton, Tat’s best friend. Katharine assumes Donna’s gaze is no accident. Tat, sitting with her own family alongside Donna’s, notices Donna’s gaze and seems to assume the same. In a hardly masked panic, Tat tries to redirect her friend’s attention to something in the program in her hands.

It is the first Sunday of October. The congregants of Graveton Congregational Church rise and sit, chant and bow their heads, in various patterns until it is time for the moment Katharine dreads, when the choir sings them off to the foyer for the tea and pastries that the church supplies every year on First
of Fall Sunday, a time for reconvening and chatting about the summer that has passed.

So it has come now, this moment of accounting. Suspicions and rumors will be confirmed. The father of their family is absent, and now everyone knows it. All other fathers are here; all other families have resurfaced from the summer, prosperous and intact for the season of work to come. It is October now, Frederick has been gone three months, and Katharine has stopped allowing herself to consider what date she expects him home.

Katharine and her daughters walk down the center aisle, shuffling among the other families in their new autumn outfits. No new outfits for the Merrills, given the cost of Mayflower, the loss of Frederick’s income. Now work has resumed, and there are (or so it seems to Katharine) the curious and judging looks, and the rumors.

Katharine sees now that she simply cannot continue in her cheery assessments. There is no knowing when Frederick will return; clearly, his time at Mayflower is something more than
a rest
. Still, Katharine cannot yet say those words, the ones that the pamphlets for Mayflower carefully elude, in the way advertisements for funeral homes elude the word
death
. Katharine cannot yet say
psychosis, manic depression, madness
. So she has begun to seek other words for it. What is between exhaustion and insanity? Katharine has settled on
nervous breakdown
, which she told only Tat when she bumped into her at the grocery.
I guess you could call it a nervous breakdown
, she explained, trying to clarify her earlier call, and then once more swore Tat to confidentiality. But clearly Tat has broken that promise. For there the Merrills are, in the foyer now, Susie displaying cookies to Katharine, as Minister James approaches directly, bypassing the rest of his
flock. The girls, curious about the minister’s attention, assemble around Katharine.

Why! Hello there!
Minister James greets them.
And how are we this morning?

Beatific
, Rebecca says, proud of the erudite irony she has just this year begun to affect.

James smiles and casts his gaze over the girls, simultaneously judgmental and benevolent. Perhaps like a father’s gaze, but that of a father different from theirs.
Excited for the new school year?

Thrilled
, Susie says.

And how are you?
James asks Katharine.
I hear you’ve had a—trying?—summer
.

Katharine shrugs and considers words for what has happened. But she simply cannot think of it, nothing that will convey what she wants to convey and still pass as graceful here, in the foyer of this church with all these friends and neighbors and daughters around her. And so, she instead offers only a wistful grin as she begins to search for other innocuous objects to set the conversation upon—worries about Susie’s math grades? Dread of the coming winter? Some kind thought about the minister’s sermon?

Eventually Susie pipes,
My dad is just getting some rest
.

James smiles.
Precisely what he needs, I’m sure
.

Susie firms her lips in a proud grin, as she returns her mother’s gaze with a look of obstinate solidarity. But then there is something surprising in her mother’s face, some shame her mother tucks in between her eyebrows that collapses Susie’s smile.

Katharine thinks: her daughters know much more than she admits to herself. Her daughters are only playing the parts they know they are expected to play in the story Katharine tries to
contrive, a fiction of a life and a family better than the one they have. Katharine has failed in keeping the truth and her girls apart.

There, again, is her father’s face, his haughty vindication. Years ago, after one Christmas when a drunken Frederick had just barely managed to stay vertical long enough to get from the living room to the car, her father had warned her,
children understand more than you think
.

But of course they understood. Of course her girls had understood each time that there had been a knock at the front door long after midnight, and they had answered it to find their father in the doorway, slurring his maudlin or spiteful words, occasionally bruised or even bleeding. They understood each time their father swaggered home in the middle of dinner, sweet-smelling of bourbon, in the company of an unannounced dinner guest—either one of his equally drunken friends or else a strange woman. The girls understood the grim fact of their father’s affliction when, drunk and volatile, he would mutter to some tormenting, abstract presence, and then berate whichever of them came close to him. Not just berate, but verbally abuse, condemning his own daughters as ignorant. And, more than by anything Frederick had done, the girls had learned the truth about their father by what he had failed to do: his long absences, his business trips that stretched for weeks, his endless nights out, his weekends away, his apparent intolerance of home. Susie’s defiant grin informs Katharine that the girls have been acceding to their mother’s cheerier simplifications only for their mother’s sake.

Katharine has spent years concealing what her husband wanted to hide, but the girls have understood anyway. She has tried to obfuscate, when clearly she ought to have confronted. And yet, for all the years of their marriage, only twice has she
dared it. Once the night when she and her mother adorned her rage with lofty language and packed his bag. And then again, one night just last spring. This time, there had been no scripted monologue. Irrepressible words had simply expelled themselves.

One Tuesday night, last May, Frederick had yet to return from a weekend
business trip
to Pittsburgh. At two in the morning, with the girls asleep in their rooms and Katharine in bed bitterly enumerating her husband’s failings, the fender of Frederick’s Oldsmobile glanced off the curb out front as he sloppily turned his car up the drive. Katharine did not go to greet him at the door; she did not try to hush his ascent to bed, for the girls’ sake. Frederick careened up the stairs, came into the lit bedroom, and nodded once at Katharine with a sad acceptance, as if, on his way home, he had not been certain he would find this reality still existent, his family he had failed again. When he climbed into bed, turned off the lamp, and rolled to his side, Katharine could smell another woman’s smell. And then it had come forth: years of silent accounting and recriminations finding words, inwardly shot rage ricocheted suddenly outward.

How?
she said.
How? How can you lie to me again and again and again? And so stupidly? Do you think I am stupid? Do you think I don’t know? How could you lie so stupidly? How could you let yourself be so pathetic? I know, Frederick. I know. I know. I know. I know their names. I know all about them
.

And then Katharine, for the first time, named They Who Shall Not Be Named, the nefarious Hamans of their marriage.
Sheila from the bank. Peggy Maxwell. Irene Mills. Shall I continue?

As Katharine counted his betrayals, Frederick lay there perfectly still, curled into himself and his apparent disregard for Katharine’s tirade. He was drunk; likely, he was asleep. And so Katharine did what she would never dare, she put her hand into
the lion’s mouth, touching a drunk Frederick with something other than gentleness. With all her strength, she turned him to her, expecting his rage, wondering if, for the first time, he might strike her. There could even be a paradoxical kind of victory in that, his cruelty finally manifested into something showable, her private misery finally welting publicly.

But, instead, he was lucid and composed. No grand theater of Frederick’s suffering this time, no spectacle of denial.

I love you very much, Katharine. But this is not what you are. You choose not to see things. Not to see those women, just as you haven’t seen me for a very, very long time. You see only what you want to see. You with your rose-colored glasses. There is something bad in me, I know it. But you want never to see it. Why do you think I need them?

How?
was all Katharine could muster in reply.
How could you love me so little?

I love you tremendously
.

I can’t live this way anymore
, Katharine said, and meant it.

Frederick left to sleep in the guest room, but later he returned and shook Katharine awake. He flipped on the bedside lamp, and she saw that his eyes had lost their lucidity, now moving with a bird’s ratcheting, mechanical movement.

What?
Katharine said.
What is it?

You are right
, Frederick said,
I’m going to tell her to leave
.

Tell who to leave?

The woman downstairs. I don’t want anyone else. I only want you. I’m going to tell her that
.

There’s a woman downstairs?
Katharine asked. But already she knew there was, of course, no other woman in the house. Only a few times had Frederick’s febrile energy, warped with bourbon, carried him to such notions, and Katharine did not try to
correct him. She thought then of the simple word she tries so hard now not to admit. There was no word for it but
madness
.

Frederick staggered dreamily into the darkened downstairs. He lit room after room, seeking to expel some imagined presence. After he had checked each room twice, he finally turned to Katharine, not in apprehension of his delusion, nor in confusion, but in delight.

She’s gone!
he said.

She is?

Gone for good
, he added and clenched his eyes, measuring what this meant.
It’s just us now. From now on. I promise
.

This is how entirely Katharine has let herself believe in false things: she thought this resolution, even if derived from delusion, might be authentic.

That night, Frederick was at his worst, drunk and manic. But he was also right. That night, Frederick believed in a person who was not there, but then, in her own way, so did Katharine.

It seems to Katharine now that she has spent all of this time loving and grasping not for the real Frederick but for just another Frederick, a trickster spirit who takes occasional possession of her husband’s body, just long enough for a few sweet or needy moments, a loving week or two, just enough to keep Katharine’s faith in his existence.

At least now, Katharine thinks, there is this clarity. With her husband gone, there is no false Frederick to distract her, no incarnating trickster rearranging the past with his affection and need.

The minister nods.
If you ever want to talk
.

Maybe James wants to help, but Katharine also sees now that he is only an ordinary person, hungry for gossip, for the proximity to the vague celebrity that disaster has lent her. Katharine sees the minister not at all as she sees him from her pew—an ethereal wisdom manifested in a face seemingly painted by John Singer Sargent—but just a person breathing his rotten breath, with a thousand oblong indentations for pores, with overly long, carnivorous teeth. She sees Tat, across the room with Donna, eyeing Katharine the way Tat might eye a dinner plate that arrives before her friends’ orders, a hunger she must pretend to ignore. Katharine suddenly wants, very much, to be away from this church and these people.

She nods a good-bye to Minister James, makes no parting gesture to Tat, and tells her girls it’s time to go. Even with cake still to be eaten, and their church friends they have not seen all summer, the girls leave without objection.

Outside, they climb into the family’s Ford Country Squire. In the hushed interior, with its used smell, all are silent as Katharine navigates the roads home.

My mother and her sisters watch their town pass by, back-to-school specials painted onto store windows, fall already infecting the upper tree branches.

Your father had a nervous breakdown
, Katharine surprises herself by saying.
If anyone asks, you can say that’s what happened
.

In the front passenger seat, Susie turns to her mother.

He just needs a rest
, Susie corrects her.

I hope that’s true. But we can’t lie to ourselves anymore. He’s had a nervous breakdown
.

There is a darkness through which Katharine has willed herself to sleep, a darkness she has glimpsed only at its peripheries, when it was altered and nearly visible in rosy diffractions. She has looked away from that darkness, in which her husband has raged and wept and fought and fucked. Katharine sees now: we can persist to see with our rosy vision, but still the night comes, concealing what it conceals. And there is no rosy way to see that blackness.

Katharine is a mother of four, with a husband in a mental hospital. The winter is coming, and the money is running out. Her marriage has failed, everyone knows it, and she has no real friends. Her relatives have turned against her husband first, and now they are turning on her too. She can no longer be anything other than what everyone plainly sees her to be.